The Nexus Archive
Early Feminism · Letter
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
by Mary Wollstonecraft · The Defender of Women's Reason · Age of Revolution, 1759-1797
Travel letters join landscape, commerce, motherhood, political judgment, and private grief.
- Advanced
- ~3 hr 45 min read
- 3 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the LETTER VI. guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
A Northern Journey After Betrayal
A change of scene can release the mind without freeing the heart. In these letters, a difficult landing, a stranger’s kindness or a waterfall can interrupt grief, yet the absent person addressed remains part of everything seen.
Published in 1796, these letters grow from Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian journey on business connected to Gilbert Imlay, the father of her child, during a period of personal crisis. She travels with a daughter and a servant, sometimes continuing alone, through places where the practical arrangements of food, work and shelter give political ideas a daily weight.
Public observation and intimate address remain inseparable. Her confidence in human improvement meets the injuries of dependence, the allure of wealth and the limits of her own knowledge. The pleasure she takes in beauty makes her more responsive to suffering, not less. The question is how to remain open to both without surrendering judgment or hope.
The letters are accompanied by Henry Morley’s much later introduction in the 1889 Cassell edition. His account of Wollstonecraft’s life and his judgments belong to that editor; the voice of the journey is hers.
The opening pages
LETTER I.
Eleven days of weariness on board a vessel not intended for the accommodation of passengers have so exhausted my spirits, to say nothing of the other causes, with which you are already sufficiently acquainted, that it is with some difficulty I adhere to my determination of giving you my observations, as I travel through new scenes, whilst warmed with the impression they have made on me.
The captain, as I mentioned to you, promised to put me on shore at Arendall or Gothenburg in his way to Elsineur, but contrary winds obliged us to pass both places during the night. In the morning, however, after we had lost sight of the entrance of the latter bay, the vessel was becalmed; and the captain, to oblige me, hanging out a signal for a pilot, bore down towards the shore.
My attention was particularly directed to the lighthouse, and you can scarcely imagine with what anxiety I watched two long hours for a boat to emancipate me; still no one appeared. Every cloud that flitted on the horizon was hailed as a liberator, till approaching nearer, like most of the prospects sketched by hope, it dissolved under the eye into disappointment.
Weary of expectation, I then began to converse with the captain on the subject, and from the tenor of the information my questions drew forth I soon concluded that if I waited for a boat I had little chance of getting on shore at this place. Despotism, as is usually the case, I found had here cramped the industry of man. The pilots being paid by the king, and scantily, they will not run into any danger, or even quit their hovels, if they can possibly avoid it, only to fulfil what is termed their duty. How different is it on the English coast, where, in the most stormy weather, boats immediately hail you, brought out by the expectation of extraordinary profit.
Disliking to sail for Elsineur, and still more to lie at anchor or cruise about the coast for several days, I exerted all my rhetoric to prevail on the captain to let me have the ship's boat, and though I added the most forcible of arguments, I for a long time addressed him in vain.
It is a kind of rule at sea not to send out a boat. The captain was a good-natured man; but men with common minds seldom break through general rules. Prudence is ever the resort of weakness, and they rarely go as far as they may in any undertaking who are determined not to go beyond it on any account. If, however, I had some trouble with the captain, I did not lose much time with the sailors, for they, all alacrity, hoisted out the boat the moment I obtained permission, and promised to row me to the lighthouse.
Chapter guides · 3
LETTER VI.
What Travel Makes Visible
Hospitality, labor and a mother’s anxiety draw Wollstonecraft’s political questions into the experience of travel.
Welcome and hierarchy
Landing on the Swedish coast, Wollstonecraft finds relief in the lieutenant’s hospitality and the kindness of strangers. But welcome does not settle her judgment of a society. She connects the pilots’ reluctance to act with their scant salaries, and challenges households that accept servants’ labor while denying their dignity. Women servants bear the heaviest burdens, even under men who insist on their own independence.
Judgment under revision
Her pleasure in rural kindness competes with impatience at what she regards as intellectual narrowness. She also questions travelers who turn brief encounters into permanent national characters. Government, education and habits of work help form the differences she sees. Her own sweeping judgments remain exposed to that criticism; the letters record a mind revising its comparisons as well as making them.
A daughter’s inheritance
The letters’ political judgment and intimate address deepen one another instead of occupying separate narratives. Separated from her daughter, whom she has left behind in Sweden, Wollstonecraft fears that cultivating the child’s mind and feelings may make her more vulnerable in a world that keeps women dependent. Sensibility gives natural beauty its force, yet the same responsiveness makes estrangement painful. Education cannot promise happiness while the conditions of women’s lives remain unchanged.
LETTER XII.
Freedom Measured in Lives
Norwegian farms suggest independence; wages, punishment and commercial confinement complicate the picture.
Independence within a monarchy
Wollstonecraft finds an unexpected degree of freedom under Denmark’s absolute king. Small farms and secure tenure seem to protect Norwegian cultivators from dependence on powerful landlords, while appeals restrain local officials. Her praise rests on how people live, rather than the name of their government. She distinguishes what she observes from stories of the Prince Royal’s kindness whose truth she does not vouch for.
What a livelihood leaves over
Material security and moral cultivation do not always advance together. A wet nurse earns twelve dollars a year while paying ten for her own child’s care; her desertion brings women’s dependence close to Wollstonecraft’s own grief. At Rusoer, commercial activity seems to enclose life within bargaining and accumulation. She also welcomes practical reform, including elected mediators intended to settle disputes before lawyers profit from them.
A return without a welcome
The landscape that feels imprisoning can become beautiful again from the water, just as hospitality can comfort without providing companionship. Returning to Tonsberg, Wollstonecraft calls it something like home but anticipates no face brightening at her arrival. Moral self-approval cannot replace affection. Her wish to be reunited with her daughter sharpens the difference between observing a place and having someone there to whom she belongs.
Friendship and novelty
About to begin the journey toward Gothenburg, she looks forward to holding her daughter again, though she fears the child will not know her. The letter closes on friendship. It is praised everywhere but rarely found, because keeping affection awake takes cultivation, and friendships held up by novelty and vanity soon fall. She ends wryly that here the crows, like the wild geese, are birds of passage.
LETTER XIX.
The Cost of Obedience
Wollstonecraft revises her account of Norwegian freedom and confronts the damage concealed by Danish order.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark?
- About 3 hr 45 min in total.
- How difficult is Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark?
- Advanced. A mid-length letter; about 4 hours of reading.
- Can I read Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark for free?
- Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 3 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and philosopher whose Vindication of the Rights of Woman became a foundational text of feminist thought. She argued for women's rational education, dignity, citizenship, and moral equality.
“What is liberty worth if women are trained for dependence?”
Wollstonecraft adds a necessary pressure point to Nexus: the language of rights must be tested against who is excluded from it.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.